not go too far into the anti-charter movement. charter schools are not private schools. they are public schools. the highly effective ones, about one-fifth of all charter schools, are killing it. they are doing a great job graduating over 90% of their kids, getting them all the way through college. and so what we need to do in resisting betsy devos is to say, look, if you want to try to supplement good charter schools, fine. but the rest of the privatization agenda, no way. aaron, i once was on the board of a charter school. i ve seen the way they work and was not impressed with some of what i saw because one of the things that charter schools do to the point, they are public schools but they also can be selective about who gets to be there and can pump themselves up by only pulling in the kids in a community who are going to be helpful to the school, who will make the school get a higher great and leaving kids who are the most in need, mentally
since election day and even more so with the education pick for secretary, betsy devos, a koch brothers aligned mega donor. she s a major supporter of charter schools and vouchers, both of which divert tax dollars that would ordinarily go to taxes that would support public schools. devos and her husband helped to pass the state s first charter school law and right-to-work legislation. she s an advocate for school s choice and some say devos has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize and
fo for-profit organizations. there s the magic work that republicans have said that they have come to destroy, regulations. that s something that donald trump is against. a interestingly, joy, i m interested that you were serving on the board. there s a real appeal there. speaking specifically about latino parents and latino folks involved, they need to get more involved. one of the things that happens is that, for example, in mexico, you send your kid to a school and that s they are taking care of it. we need to be much more engaged in terms of what is happening in our country but particularly if charter schools are going to be taking off, latino who are educators, involved, who know policy, who are representing their community got to be involved. this is a time to bring their voice into the conversation. and their particular needs, which i think again benefit all of us into the conversation. and charlie, that is a point, right? that you re seeing these sort of
corporate interests come in and sometimes there s only a handful running lots and lots of these schools, almost like a chain restaurant almost, and you don t have a lot of people from the communities involved. yeah. i m less anguine that having charter schooled without proper regulation and oversight, you can keep the corporate world out because the corporate world will keep hammering you and hammering you until you let them in. we had a referendum in massachusetts to lift our statewide cap on public schools and massachusetts, of course, is the place where the american public school was invented. it went down in flames. largely because people reacted to the amount of out of state corporate money coming in to lift the cap and the fear was that the more money the more charter schools you opened, the less local control you would have, the less regulation and eventually down the road you wind up with a situation like we have in detroit where i am now